Day 5 - Captivating Power of Oreo's

And, yet again, I forgot.  I am deeply sorry.  It won't happen again.  I mean it this time.  Yesterday was a very boring day.  I slept in.  I ate, came home, played games. ate, came home, and watched some Hulu shows at night.  And boy, what a lame week for NBC's shows.  Oh well.  On the good side, I did get a package of magical Double Stuff Oreo's.  Yay :D

Day 4 - Applicious

Well crap.  I forgot to do one last night before bed.  I'll write one now and pretend that I didn't miss a day.  Good?  Good.

Yesterday was okay.  Aside from not doing anything.  But Amazon came out with competition for Google's android market, and to draw people to it, they're giving out a different app for free each day.  Most android apps are free, but they're giving away the un-free ones.  Totally awesome.  :)  The first was the paid version of Shazam, an app that listens to music that's playing and can tell you what it is.  The free version only lets you do it five times.  Then the next was a fancy clock/calendar/weather widget that goes on the homescreen.  It looks much better than the one that came with the phone, and does more stuff.  Always good.  Then for Saturday, there's new keyboard software that predicts what you're going to say as you're typing.  Makes the on-screen much more efficient to use.  And now that my mom has it, hopefully she won't get anymore insane autocorrect errors.

Day 3 - Rainbows, Unicorns, and a Fiery Jack Stand

Today, I woke up and went to engineering.  We had to make a rubber cap for our jack stand ratchet, something designed to be visually appealing, and make our jack stand more desirable than the competition.  I of course went for the flames.

Epic Flames

It was yet another sunny warm day.  Also laundry day.  Thats always the day I put off every month.  Oh well.  The sun was nice.  Oh, and Robot Unicorn Attack is a very fun and addicting game.  Bye!

Day 2 - Here Comes the Sun!

(...do do do do!)

Hello, internet! Today was a marvelous day. So sunny. My sunglasses got to be used today. They were happy. And I found out I don't have english on Friday. Yay for extra breaks. :)

Okay, to be honest I'm blanking on what else happened. Nothing significant. You aren't missing much, don't worry :P See ya tomorrow!

Day 1 - Reverse Engineering by a Hungry Man

Okay I admit that yesterday should have been day one, but I got lazy. So, we're starting today. Excited?! I am! This is going to be cool. Although I suppose this would be a more exciting concept if I actually did interesting things. Oh well! Here goes.

Today, I got up and did some dumb reverse engineering. Then, I did some gened homework, and then was off to a chem lab! It actually wasn't horrible. We had a group of three instead of two. I worked the computer. Score.

I came home and ate a hungry man dinner. That makes any day a good day. That is basically all. Oh, I also made a cool thing in excel doing searches on Google. I shall attach it. See you tomorrow!

State of the Blog address

Well, it has come to my attention that this blog is boring. Well, not the actual posts. The posts are awesome. Just that the site has been inactive since mid-February. And this simply will not do.

So, here is a neat idea. I'm going to make an attempt (however futile it may be) to post a mini post every night before I go to sleep. I want to see how many consecutive days I can go. Not only will it be a fun thing, it will also be some sort of archive of my life. I can never remember doing things, or when I did certain things. By putting it online, it will always be right there. Almost as great as having an actual memory!  ...I do envy my awesome girlfriend for that.

These new daily posts won't be like the others. They will be short, to the point, a basic play-by-play of the day's significant events. They'll all be numbered, so we'll all know exactly how far I've gone once I screw up. Won't that just be great. :) And maybe, just maybe, I'll throw a legitimate post in the mix. Mwa ha ha.

As a follow up to that last post, Google never got back to me, so I can only assume that they ran out of Cr-48's before they got to my application. That's the only reasonable explanation. Why else wouldn't they give me one.

Practicality.

Something I have very little of.

My significant other and I had a little "discussion" today about web browsing.  Well, should have seen it coming really, given that it happens every other week.  Today, as usual, chrome was the topic of discussion, i.e. why I think it's so great.  And I won't go into specifics on that, because I know there is quite the browser war out there, and I'm not going to feed the flames (especially with the majority of this blog's readers being IE users).

Long story short, I like having only the features I need, with the ability to customize my browser to do whatever I want it to.  And the speed is a plus.

Anywho, amidst my nerdy internet surfing this afternoon, I stumbled upon THIS!

*Queue heavenly choir*

Basically, its a laptop/netbook that starts up in 10 seconds flat, and only has a browser, with many built in apps for all the everyday things you do on your computer.  Pretty much sums up practicality to the letter.  I saw it months ago in a press release on YouTube, but didn't think it was coming out for a while!  I am so darn excited.  I signed up for the trial.  Its a long shot, but maybe they need the opinions of some college students (and Google men) like myself. I mean, as candidates go, I use Google products for everything...

But yeah.  Cross your fingers for me.  It said they only need a handful of testers, but I'm optimistic.  Again.  Seems like I have a lot of optimism keeping me going these days.  Anyway, I can't wait to play with this, whether I get to be a part of the trial, or just have to wait for it to hit stores.

Also on my mind today?  Adsense is pretty amazing.  So is waking up to find snow.  And having a really cool girlfriend.  That's neat.

Photo Editing, Valentine’s Day, and Acetic Acid

Something fun, something I don’t understand, and something I would readily put on Fish and Chips.

So, over the past year or so, I've been wallowing in the pit of despair that is, living without Photoshop.  I had access to it when I took Photography in high school, but ever since, I haven't really had the best luck with photo editing.  Well, the other day I was down in a computer lab in my dorm for some reason, and I was checkin' out all the software those fully loaded computers had.  Do my delight, Photoshop CS5 was on there.  But then I found something very similar.  Its a free program, with all the useful photoshop features, like the handy-dandy clone stamp tool, called Paint.NET.  So, I got that on my computer, and have been having fun with it ever since.

First, I competed in Rick Mercer's "Photo Challenge".  I'll see if I win next week.  Doubt it, as its my first try. But hey, yay for optimism, right?

In the original, he was sans-chicken

Then, I had a better idea.  Valentine's Day was just a couple days away.  I thought, wouldn't it be awesome to trick my super awesome girlfriend with my crazy awesome skillz?  Well I thought so.  So, I got to work on planning my fake trip to Utah.  First, I just snagged one of the Windows backgrounds, and a dorky picture of myself off Facebook and stuck them together.  With a little tweaking, this is what happened.

Dork, to the MAX

Looks pretty Utah-esque, right?

Then, I got a little more creative.

The Vegas Airport

Her room, not creepy, right?

Her parking lot

Welcome to Utah sign, thanks, Google Maps!

SUU sign... obviously

Needless to say, I had fun.  And before you start hating, no, that wasn't her real present.  I actually got her a few flowers. :)

As for acetic acid... well I just got back from a chemistry lab, so my hands smell quite a bit like it.  Mmmm... vinegar.